Jake Sisko has a surprisingly healthy mental outlook considering the traumatic childhood of losing his mother at age 11 during the infamous Borg massacre at the Battle of Wolf 359; he was unconscious when his father barely saved him from their wrecked cabin on the U.S.S. Saratoga and fled to escape pods. The memory is ever-present but only occasionally haunts him, as on the fourth anniversary of her death, whenever the Captain leaves for a risky mission that might leave him orphaned again, and when the chance to meet the mirror-universe Jennifer Sisko lured him into a trap in that dimension in 2372.

Jake shares a deep love and familial friendship with his father that has greatly buttressed the normal strains of his teenage years; the love is echoed with the bond he has with his grandfather Joseph, although visits spent helping out in the kitchen and garden are not seen as fun. At times the young man has shown more openness and concern for his dad's romantic life than his own, having been uncomfortable initially discussing dating and his career goals but able to introduce his father to freighter captain Kasidy Yates in late 2371. He knew Captain Sisko had finally accepted DS9 as "home" when he took his ancient African art collection out of storage on Earth earlier that year and brought it to the station.

As a young boy Jake loved his nursery's ceiling starfield as a child and wondered why it couldn't go along when the Siskos moved - a tale his father loves to tell. Before Wolf 359, the family had enjoyed their most memorable vacation ever on a camping trip to Itamish III, where his mom had taught Jake to water-ski.

Having settled into life after his mother's death at the Utopia Planetia yards on Mars, just next door to Earth, Jake was not happy with the move to the dilapidated DS9 in 2369. Out of mutual loneliness there he soon met and befriended Nog, a Ferengi boy often in trouble; the two were among only 14 children aged 8 to 16 on the station at the time, mostly Bajoran. Among their interests the two boys enjoyed girl-watching, but the elder Sisko had worried about Nog's too-great influence in everything from staying up too late to girls to a lack of ethics. He need not: Jake had already learned his dad's values of tolerance, kindness and honesty and is responsible with his own priorities between work and play. Jake was bothered when Nog once wanted him to lie for him about stolen homework and then pulled out of school on Rom's order, but the boys decided to ignore their fathers' demands and Jake tutored him to read. If not for Jake's patience, Nog would never have made their Noh-Jay Consortium pay off or perhaps have the confidence, maturity and broader outlook to apply for Starfleet Academy years later. He and Nog were Keiko's last two pupils when she closed the school in 2371, and she tutored them privately after that until she left. They were on the verge of splitting forever, but when Sisko admitted he had been wrong about their friendship the two made amends as Nog left for the Academy - even though he too had thought Nog was joking about his academy application.

Jake recalls his first date was to be in early 2370 with a Bajoran girl, Laira, but it was called off when her father forbid it amid the growing xenophobia fanned by The Circle faction at the time. His next known "date" a few months later was with Mardah, a Dabo girl, then 19; supposedly just tutoring her in entomology, he soon decided she was the love of his life and wanted his dad to have her for dinner. A year later it finally happened; Captain Sisko shocked him by inviting her, but though nervous they hit it off. Mardah's sudden departure weeks later for schooling on Regulus III left him glum, but he was soon caught up by Lwaxana Troi's Zanthi fever - which only acts in case of latent pre-existing emotions - and fell hard for Kira during the Gratitude Festival. A relationship with the human girl Leanne was nearly sabotaged by Nog's Ferengi attitude on a double date; he was still seeing her weeks later at the time he joined his dad in the Bajoran solar sailer.

The depths of his bond with Captain Sisko were borne out again when the young man decided that a Starfleet life was not for him, and was relieved when his surprised father supported his ambitions to be a writer. His interest in poetry had been exposed only months before at the infamous dinner with Sisko and Mardah, and still later he'd been embarrassed about his writing and an early story about the Maquis. Keiko, who had encouraged Jake with his blossoming interest, helped him secure a scholarship to the Pennington School in New Zealand in 2371, though he deferred it a year - again out of concern about leaving before his dad had begun dating. He visited the school again a year later during the Dominion invasion scare and has since not spoken of any plans there.

Jake's actions have also been heroic, helping to save himself, his dad and O'Brien when the station's old counter-insurgency program kicked into gear. Later, while in a reality eventually to be known only to his father, he sacrificed his life as a writer in a discarded timeline to give Sisko a second chance to avoid a fatal accident on the U.S.S. Defiant.

Before Keiko O'Brien's school opened in 2369 he'd learned by home study on computer, but quickly came to like her. Like any teen, Jake didn't see the need in studying esoteric subjects like Klingon opera. Algebra was not a simple school subject for him, but only weeks later he was studying calculus. Although his grades are "great" as of SD 47552, he placed in the lower third on mechanical science and led his dad to ask O'Brien about a tutoring mentorship; he calls himself a "low-tech kind of guy." The training came in handy when he and Nog were trapped in the Gamma Quadrant on a Runabout with the Jem'Hadar in pursuit, having asked for a flying lesson only days before.

Playing with model starships was a boyhood pastime, and he's also inherited some of the Sisko men's cooking flair; A favorite drink is lemonade; he also enjoys I'danian spice pudding, and orange juice and oatmeal for breakfast. Though he still has the instrument, he took keyboard lessons for a while but it never caught on. Within a few months after arriving at DS9 his other hobbies, often shared with Nog, included school projects, playing cards, dom-jot, and even baseball, with Jake inheriting the passion from his dad and playing on his program in the holosuites. By early 2370 he was batting against Bob Gibson's curve ball in the holo-program; by midyear he could strike out his dad with a curve ball, and a year later when he had grown as tall as Sisko he could pitch inside to back off even his dad from the plate.

Jake Sisko has continued to find a life for himself on the station as he develops his writing aptitude amid the latest news from the Dominion, Borg, Bajorans, Cardassians and Klingons. His artistic muse almost killed him when an alien female, still unidentified as to species, literally drew sustenance form his own speeded-up creativity; the near-fatal incident did yield the first chapter of a book named "."

This doctor was witness to a personal landmark in his life when Jake faced both fear and courage during my side trip to Ajilon Prime to aid their overrun field hospital amid the height of fighting there during the UFP-Klingon Archanis sector border wars. The trip started out as a chance for young Sisko to pen an article over the outcry one of this doctor's articles caused at a medical conference, but to his credit he wrote a much more exciting and personal expose of his own personal highs and lows at Ajilon and then shared them.

An unexpected twist came when his old buddy Nog returned to do sophomore-year field study at DS9. Their euphoria at moving out and in together turned sour quickly when Nog's neatness streak collided with Jake's less than strict housecleaning. After a spat and a talk by their fathers the boys patched things up. At the time, he was working on a story entitled "Past Prologue."

Almost as emotionally draining was the weight that rested solely on his shoulders when Jake made the decision to save his father, rather than allow his continued "visions" to fatally degrade his neural system. While all of us knew that the captain's life had to come before the promise of any elusive messages from the Prophet aliens, it was still hard for Jake to run counter to his father's heartfelt wishes.

On a side note, I continue to hear of young Sisko's casual ease in gourmet cooking with such dishes as chicken a la Sisko and lingta roast -- an almost genetic trait shared by the men of his family. With Nog gone, he had also taken to playing computer dom-jot as a break in writing.